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“Well what else do I have to do today?”

“Tav’s reopening the reinforced suite. He wants you to see it before the doors open tonight.” He shrugs. “You’re an owner. Owners walk the rooms.”

The reinforced suite is the one at the end of the main corridor downstairs, the one with the steel slab floor, where forty trolls danced at a wedding on Wednesday. It’s been closed since Wednesday night. After Tav found the cut bolts on the frame in the rigging room, he stopped trusting anything that hung from a ceiling down here. He had Grady’s crew pull the suite’s overhead rig as a precaution and put a brand-new one in.

Grady signed it off at noon today. The tag is on the door when I get there at five-thirty. Inspected. Approved for use. GRADY. Blocky capitals.

Tav’s standing in front of the door, looking at the tag.

“You don’t like it,” I say.

“I like the rig,” Tav says. “I watched them hang it. I checked every cable I could reach this afternoon.” His ears flick. “I don’t like signatures right now.”

“Fair.”

He holds the door for me, and I go in.

The suite is huge. The ceiling is twenty feet up, crossed with steel beams, and everything in here is built for somebody Tav’s size or bigger. There’s a bed against the far wall that’s basically a stage, with an iron frame as thick as my arm. There’s a table made from a single slab of oak with legs as thick as Tav’s. There’s a couch I could lie down on sideways. The walls are dark wood, and there are iron rings set in them at heights I don’t want to think too hard about.

The new rig hangs from the center beam. I don’t know what to call any of it. There’s a steel bar about ten feet long hanging level on two cables, high up. Off to one side, along the wall, there’s a big steel block the size of an oven, hanging from two cables that run up into a metal housing in the ceiling. Tav told me on the way down that it’s a counterweight. It’s what keeps the bar from dropping when somebody heavy is hanging off it.

Everything smells like new oil and sawdust.

“This is a lot of room,” I say.

“I need a lot of room.”

“I can see that.” I walk over to the bed and push on the mattress with both hands. It doesn’t give at all. “Is this a bed or a loading dock?”

“It’s a bed.” He comes to stand beside me, and I have to tip my head all the way back to see his face. “It’s a good bed.”

“Have you tested it personally?”

His ears go back, and then forward, and I think he might be blushing under the fur.

“Boss,” he says.

“I’m just asking. As an owner.”

He looks down at me. There’s sawdust in the curls between his horns. I reach up, all the way up on my toes, and brush it out, and my fingers graze the base of his left horn on the way.

He makes a low, rough sound, deep in his chest. Then he catches my wrist, very gently, in a hand big enough to hold my whole waist.

“Not here,” he says. “Not when I’m working.”

“When, then?”

“Later.” He doesn’t let go of my wrist. “Soon.”

The radio on his belt crackles. It’s one of William’s new ones, on the channel that doesn’t need cell signal.

“Tav, it’s Grady. You want to look at this panel before I close it up?”

Tav lets go of me. He unclips the radio. “Coming.” Then, into the radio, the way William told everybody to do now: “Owner’s in the reinforced suite. Iverson. I’m stepping into the mechanical room.”

“Copy,” Pell says on the channel, from somewhere. “Iverson in the reinforced suite.”

Tav points at the far side of the room, by the bed, where there’s a clear stretch of floor away from the rig. “Stand there. Don’t touch anything that moves. I’ll be two minutes.”